1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to generally to the field of sorting techniques and architectures.
2. Description of Related Art
Data structures known as heaps have been used previously to sort a set of values in ascending or descending order. Rather than storing the values in a fully sorted fashion, the values are “loosely” sorted such that the technique allows simple extraction of the lowest or greatest value from the structure. Exact sorting of the values in a heap is performed as the values are removed from the heap; i.e, the values are removed from the heap in sorted order. This makes a heap useful for sorting applications in which the values must be traversed in sorted order only once.
The properties of a heap data structure are as follows.                P1. A heap is a binary tree, or a k-ary tree where k>2.        P2. A heap is a balanced tree; i.e., the depth of the tree for a set of values is bounded to logk(N), where N is the number of elements in the tree, and where k is described above.        P3. The values in a heap are stored such that a parent node is always of higher priority than all of its k descendent nodes. Higher priority means “higher priority to be removed from the heap”.        P4. A heap is always left (or right) justified and only the bottom level may contain “holes” (a lack of values) on the right (or left) side of that level.        
Property P2 is a reason that heaps are a popular method of sorting in systems where the sorted data must be traversed only once. The bounded depth provides a deterministic search time whereas a simple binary or k-ary tree structure does not.
Property P3 dictates that the root node of the tree always holds the highest priority value in the heap. In other words, it holds the next value to be removed from the heap since values are removed in sorted order. Therefore, repeatedly removing the root node removes the values in the heap in sorted order.
FIG. 1 is a conventional architectural diagram illustrating a tree-based heap data structure 10, with a level 0 of heap, a level 1 of heap, a level 2 of heap, and a level 3 of heap. Tree-like data structures such as heaps are typically depicted and implemented as a series of nodes and pointers to nodes. Each node comprises a value to be sorted. In the level 0 of heap, a node 11 stores a value of 5. In the level 1 of heap, a node 12 stores a value of 22, and a node 13 stores a value of 10. In the level 2 of heap, a node 14 stores a value of 26, a node 15 stores a value of 23, a node 16 stores a value of 24, and a node 17 stores a value of 17. In the level 3 of heap, a node 18 stores a value of 27, and a node 19 stores a value of 38.
FIG. 2 is a conventional architectural diagram illustrating an array-based heap data structure 20. It is well known in the art that balanced trees, such as heaps, may be constructed with arrays. The array-based heap data structure 20 eliminates the need to keep forward and backward pointers in the tree structure.
FIG. 3 is a conventional flow diagram illustrating the process of a heap remove operation 30. Once a root node 11 is removed, a “hole” is created in the root node position 11. To fill the hole in the root node 11, the bottom-most, right-most value (BRV) 12 is removed from the heap and is placed in the hole in the root node 11. Then, the BRV and the k descendent nodes are examined and the highest priority value, if not the BRV itself, is swapped with the BRV. This continues down the heap. This comparison and swapping of values is known as the “percolate” operation.
FIG. 4 is a conventional flow diagram illustrating the process for a heap insert operation 40. To add a value to be sorted into the heap, a slightly different kind of percolate operation is performed. The first hole 41 to the right of the bottom-most, right-most value is identified, and the new value is inserted there. This value is compared to the value in its parent node. If the new value is of higher priority than the parent value, the two values swap places. This continues until the new value is of lower priority, or until the root of the tree is reached. That is, the percolate continues up the tree structure rather than down it.
The described methods of adding and removing values to and from a heap inherently keeps a heap balanced: no additional data structures or algorithms are required to balance a heap. This means that heaps are as space-efficient as binary or k-ary trees even though the worst case operational performance of a heap is better than that of a simple tree.
A third operation is also possible: “swap”. A swap operation consists of a remove operation whereby the BRV is not used to fill the resultant hole in the root node 11. Instead, a new value is immediately re-inserted. The percolate operation is performed is identical to the delete case.
Because the percolate operations for remove and for insert traverse the data structure in different directions, parallelism and pipelining of the heap algorithm are inefficient and difficult, respectively.
High-speed implementations of heaps seek to find a way to execute the heap algorithm in hardware rather than in a software program. One such implementation is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,603,023. This implementation uses a number of so-called “macrocells,” each consisting of two storage elements. Each storage element can store one value residing in a heap. The two storage elements in a macrocell are connected to comparison logic such that the greater (or lesser) or the two can be determined and subsequently be output from the macrocell. A single so-called “comparing and rewriting control circuit” is connected to each macrocell so the comparisons between parent nodes and child nodes can be accommodated. In every case, both child nodes of a given parent are in the same macrocell, and the parent is in a different macrocell.
The shortcomings of the heap data structure and of previous implementations are described in the following points:                S1. Efficient pipelined heaps cannot be implemented due to opposing percolate operations.        There are two completely different percolate operations described in the previous section: one is used to remove values from the heap in sorted order, and one is used to insert new values into the heap. The former operation percolates downward from the top of the heap, whereas the latter operation percolates upward from the bottom of the heap.        A pipelined hardware operation is similar to an assembly line in a factory. In a pipelined heap—if such a structure existed—one insertion or removal operation would go through several stages to complete the operation, but another operation would be in the previous stage. Each operation goes through all the stages. I.e., if stage Sj is currently processing operation i, stage Sj-l is currently processing operation i+l, stage Sj-2 is currently processing operation i+2, and so on.However, since some operations flow through the heap in one direction (e.g., insertion), whereas other operations flow though the heap in the other direction (e.g., removal), an efficient pipeline that supports a mix of the two operations is difficult to construct. This is because a removal operation needs to have current, accurate data in the root node (property P3, section 4.1) before it can begin, but an insertion of a new value percolates from the bottom up (see section 4.1). Thus, an insert operation is executed before a subsequent removal operation can be started. This is the direct opposite of a pipeline.A unidirectional heap that operates only top-down is in the public domain. To operate in this fashion, the insert operation computes a path through the heap to the first unused value in the heap. Additionally, a simple method is proposed for tracking this first unused position. However, this tracking method assumes that heap property P4 holds. Although this property holds true for a traditional heap, removal of this property is desirable to eliminate shortcoming S2, described below. Thus, a suitable unidirectional heap structure suitable for high-speed pipelining does not exist in the current state of the art.            S2. Pipelined implementations of heaps are difficult to construct in high-speed applications due to the specifics of the “remove & percolate” operation.The operation that removes values from a heap in sorted order leaves a “hole” in the root node once the highest priority value has been removed. This hole is filled with the bottom-most, right-most value in the heap.In order to fill the hole caused by a remove operation, a hardware implementation of a heap must read the memory system associated with the current bottom of the tree to get the last value of the tree. This requires (a) that the location of the bottom always be known, and (b) that the all the RAM systems, except the tree root, run faster than otherwise necessary. When the each of the logk(N) tree levels of the heap has a dedicated RAM system, the required speedup is two times the speed otherwise required. (Placing the logk(N) tree levels of the heap in separate RAMs is the most efficient way to implement a pipelined heap, if such a thing existed, since it has the advantage of using the lowest speed RAMs for any given implementation.)Point (b) states that “all” memory systems must be faster because the bottom of the heap can appear in any of the logk(N) memories.Point (b) states that the memory must be twice as fast because the RAM is read first to get the value to fill the hole. The RAM may then be written to account for the fact that the value has been removed. Later, if the downward percolation reaches the bottom level, the RAM will be again read and (potentially) written. Thus, a single operation may cause up to 4 accesses to RAM. Only 2 accesses are necessary if the remove operation is optimized to avoid reading and writing the bottom-most level to get the bottom-most, right-most value.    S3. A conventional design may not be fully pipelined. That is, since there is only one “comparing and rewriting control circuit,” and since this circuit is required for every parent-child comparison in a percolate operation, it is difficult to have multiple parent-child comparisons from multiple heap-insert or heap-remove operations being processed simultaneously. This means that an insert or remove operation is executed before a new one is started.    S4. A conventional design is structured so that it takes longer to remove values from deeper heaps than from shallower heaps.    S5. A conventional design is incapable of automatically constructing a heap. An external central processor is repeatedly interacting with the design to build a sorted heap. (Once the heap is correctly constructed, however, the values may be removed in order without the intervention of the central processor).    S6. A conventional design employs so called “macrocells” that contain two special memory structures. Each macrocell is connected to a single so called “comparing and rewriting control circuit” that is required to perform the parent-child comparisons required for percolate operations.This structure means that a macrocell is required for every pair of nodes in the heap, which in turn means that:The structure does not efficiently scale to large heaps since large quantities of these special memory structures consume more area on a silicon die than would a traditional RAM memory sized to hold the same number of heap values.The structure is costly to rework into a k-ary heap where k>2 since comparison logic grows more complex with the number of values being compared.    S7. A conventional design does nothing to prevent the painful problem of using a value from the bottom of the heap to fill the root node during a remove operation. The conventional design provides dedicated hardware to facilitate this nuance of heaps.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a method and structure for a more efficient and flexible processing of a heap data structure.